Entertainment

How Twitter Tracks the Spread of Disease in Real Time

The Global Innovation Series is supported by BMW i, a new concept dedicated to providing mobility solutions for the urban environment. It delivers more than purpose-built electric vehicles — it delivers smart mobility services. Visit bmw-i.com or follow @BMWi on Twitter.

When the first cases of swine flu were detected in the spring of 2009, Twitter helped to inflame the panic that spread well ahead of the disease. The idea that anything useful could be mined from the flood of tweets reacting to the nascent threat was widely dismissed.

"Unlike basic Internet search ... Twitter seems to have introduced too much noise into the process: As opposed to search requests, which are generally motivated only by a desire to learn more about a given subject, too many Twitter conversations about swine flu seem to be motivated by desires to fit in, do what one's friends do (i.e. tweet about it) or simply gain more popularity," explained one NPR article.

Researchers from Google and Yahoo had already found that certain search terms were good indicators of flu activity. Google had even launched Google Flu Trends, which provides public estimations for flu activity. But Twitter, it seemed, was only distracting us from reality — not helping us understand it.

Yet a multi-disciplinary team of researchers at the University of Iowa had hope that Twitter could not only track the reaction to H1N1, but also track the disease itself by using contextual information in tweets that isn't available in search terms.

“We had no idea that we would actually be able to do the second part when we started it," explains Dr. Philip Polgreen, one member of that team. And so, it seems, Twitter could become an innovative scientific tool for epidemiologists.

As the number of actual cases of flu increased to a point where estimates could be compared to reality, the team found a way to execute their plans for real-time disease tracking through Twitter. They created a program that analyzed how the Twitter stream changed as the number of actual cases reported through the Centers for Disease Control fluctuated. No human was needed to decide which terms were relevant — it was all done on the web. The program located Twitter terms that fluctuated in relation to actual cases, which were often related to aspects of disease such as fever temperature and doctor visits.

It then used those terms to spot signs of the flu in other geographic areas before cases were reported. The accuracy of the results demonstrated that it was possible to cut through Twitter's noise and locate indicators for the flu. At the time, the real-time estimations in the study were one to two weeks faster than that of traditional flu tracking mechanisms — a time difference that matters greatly in making disease estimates useful.

"If you want to allocate resources in an effective manner," Polgreen says, "you really want to be able to anticipate demand ... there are huge implications on staffing and supplies. "

In a paper about the study published in April, the research team describes its results as "promising" for assessing not just disease activity, but also ancillary issues like treatment side effects or potential medication shortages. At the same time, they're also realistic about Twitter's limitations for tracking disease. Not everybody uses Twitter, and there are some places where the social media tool has very few users. Twitter activity is also not constant throughout the week, and the demographic of Twitter users is not representative of the general population.

"I don’t think this will replace traditional surveillance at all," Polgreen says. "In fact, there’s no way to validate these lines of investigation without traditional surveillance information. But I think, and I like to hope, that it provides another stream of information."

The Global Innovation Series is supported by BMW i, a new concept dedicated to providing mobility solutions for the urban environment. It delivers more than purpose-built electric vehicles; it delivers smart mobility services within and beyond the car. Visit bmw-i.com or follow @BMWi on Twitter.

Are you an innovative entrepreneur? Submit your pitch to BMW i Ventures, a mobility and tech venture capital company.

Mashable
is a global, multi-platform media and entertainment company. Powered by its own proprietary technology, Mashable is the go-to source for tech, digital culture and entertainment content for its dedicated and influential audience around the globe.